A Burnt-out case

Another old, small paperback - and I've found that there are some of this edition of Graham Greene's A Burnt-out Case for sale on Amazon, though as it's only the 1980 edition it hardly counts, surely, as vintage? The novel, about a famous architect hiding from the world in a leper colony in Africa, was written in 1960, though it has that timeless quality of Greeneland, and, like the other books I've been re-reading, that same effortlessly elegant prose. The opening two sentences give a taste of what is to come:

The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: 'I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,' then sat pen in hand with no more to record. The captain in a white soutane stood by the open windows of the saloon reading his breviary.

There you have it. The assumption that the reader will know the original of the parody, the nameless characters about whom we will gradually learn more, the Catholic priest captaining the boat promising that there will be Catholic guilt at some point. Querry, the passenger, doesn't in fact suffer from guilt - he has lost the ability to feel much about anything at all. Famous in his field, victim of a terrible attack of indifference, he arrives at the Congo leper village where the doctor diagnoses him as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper who has gone through the stage of mutilation and in whom the disease is no longer active.

A strange book. It depressed me when I read it in the 70s, though understanding has grown in the intervening years. The end comes with shocking banality - but is perhaps the only conclusion that would satisfy. I'm glad I read it again - I'd forgotten big chunks of it, and became immersed in the heat and difficulties of Querry's new life and the awfulness of the white community beyond the leproserie. And yes, it was immensely portable.

Journey into an old friend

I've just been re-reading Eric Ambler's thriller Journey into Fear, not in the Penguin Modern Classics edition shown here but in a Fontana edition of 1973. The book itself was first published in 1940, and there are reminders of its vintage in the length of the sentences, the complexity of the syntax, and the fact that the hero and his nemesis discuss philosophy and ancient history at length over a meal rather than have the content of their conversation swiftly summarised by the author. Graham Greene - and I'm now re-reading one of his novels - described Ambler as "unquestionably our best thriller writer", and there are similarities in style between the two writers' work. I found myself vaguely recalling that so-and-so was found dead, and that thingummyjig turned out to be a baddie, but these memories served only to sharpen the suspense, which is that of the skilfully-handled closed environment (in this case a steamer) in which the protagonists must constantly interact.

But the thing that struck me most forcibly while I was reading was the size of the book. Remember when paperbacks used to be small? Little, lightweight things that could be stuffed in a pocket? That you could read in bed without fearing a broken nose should you fall asleep while reading? When did they become large-format tomes with lots of white space and big print? I found I really enjoyed this foray into the past: the yellowing pages and 9-point text seemed suited to the slightly formal prose and the menace of travel in the early part of the war, and I remember my mother telling me that she used to send paperbacks out to Egypt for my father to read. I can imagine a small Fontana book pulled from a battledress pocket in a desert bivvie - but not a fat, glossy, self-satisfied modern edition.

More blasts from the literary past to follow ...